Off the Shelf: Folk Photography

What’s the cheapest and easiest way to shoot and share a quick-and-dirty snapshot? Today, of course, it’s the cell-phone camera. A century ago it was the real-photo postcard. As Luc Sante explains in his new book “Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard 1905-1930,” a lucky combination of technology and legislation kicked off a craze in real-photo postcards (so named because the cards were actual photo prints, created singly or in small batches). In 1905, the postal service began charging only a penny to mail a postcard. In 1906, Eastman Kodak began printing photos on postcard stock at no extra charge. As the American frontier pushed ever west, migratory Americans could now send home instant visual witness of their new surroundings.

Offering his own weird and beautiful collection of postcards as evidence, Sante argues that real-photo cards represent a significant and underrecognized body of amateur folk art. The photo postcard, he writes, “is a vast, teeming, borderless body of work that might as well have a single, hydra-headed author, a sort of Homer of the small towns and prairies.” At the very least, they offer a remarkably thorough and unstudied documentary record of their time, capturing “the panorama of human activities: eating, sleeping, labor, worship, animal husbandry, amateur theatrics, barn-raising, spirit-rapping, dissolution, riot, disaster, death.” Here’s a sample.

Caption: “FIRST TRAIN PENETRATING S.D. BAD LANDS.” Sent on August 5, 1908, from the South Dakota interior to Parkson, South Dakota.